A 19-year-old Cobb County Jail inmate died Saturday, apparently by suicide, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
A sheriff’s deputy found Augustus Green unresponsive in his cell and attempted to revive him before he was transported to Wellstar Kennestone Hospital.
The Sheriff’s Office said it has notified the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and that the Cobb Medical Examiner’s office would determine Green’s official cause of death.
“I’m heartbroken to announce a young man took his own life last night,” Sheriff Craig Owens said in a news release Sunday. “It’s especially hard considering it’s Father’s Day weekend and a family is now mourning the loss of their loved one.”
Green was booked into the jail in March and was awaiting trial on a number of charges, including aggravated assault, according to the Sheriff’s Office. He was being held in what the Sheriff’s Office called a standard cell and was not under close observation. In contrast, the Sheriff’s Office said, detainees who express suicidal thoughts are placed under close observation and routinely monitored by mental health staff.
Between 2009 and October of last year, 36 people who were held in Cobb’s jail died, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation. At least five people have hanged themselves inside the lockup since 2019.
In May of last year, Owens announced his office was trying out high-tech wristbands for tracking inmates’ vital signs. The move came after three inmate deaths in the Cobb jail that same month, including two suicides and one that was still under investigation at the time.
DeKalb County jailers said this year they were preparing to join their counterparts in Cobb and Fulton in tracking the health of their inmates with similar wristbands.
In Cobb, the Sheriff’s Office has also launched a 24-hour mental health program for detainees.
“When people are determined to hurt themselves, there is not a whole lot we can do sometimes. We try to do everything we possibly can to prevent that,” Owens said in May of last year. “We’ve had six unfortunate incidents of deaths in our facilities and I’m not proud of that, but if you look around in metro Atlanta, we are not much different than anyone else.”
“We are not mental health professionals. That is not what we do, we are a correction (facility) and we get ahold of them until they get their day in court. I’m not here to perform mental health services,” Owens added last year. “I don’t want one death. One death is too many.”
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